payment page
So it is, besieged with sable-colored melancholy, I did comment the black oppressing humor to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air; and, as I am a gentleman, betook myself to walk. The time when? About the sixth hour, when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper. So much for the time when. Nor for the ground which—which, I mean, I walked upon. It is yclept thy park. (1.1.235–43)
So begins the lengthy letter Armado writes to the King recounting the arrest of the fool Costard, whom he found fraternizing with the maid Jaquenetta in a park. Armado’s style immediately strikes us as ridiculous, full of absurd words and characterized by a bizarre and misplaced formality. His use of the deliberately archaic word “yclept,” which simply means “called,” reads like some kind of absurd punch line. On the one hand, these words demonstrate what’s fundamentally ludicrous about Armado, a man who, as Holofernes will aptly put it later, “draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument” (5.1.17–18). On the other hand, this speech retroactively makes the audience skeptical of the King and his lords, who earlier in the scene had celebrated Armado as “a man of fire-new words, fashion’s new knight” (1.1.182).
Adieu, valor; rust, rapier; be still, drum, for your manager is in love. Yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit, write pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio. (1.2.181–85)
Armado speaks these words to himself as he succumbs to his infatuation with the country maid, Jaquenetta. It’s curious to note that his language here isn’t particularly wordy or ridiculous. When no longer performing for an audience, Armado’s speech is quite concise and efficient. Yet a hint of the ridiculous remains in his image of “turn[ing] sonnet”—an odd phrase that could just as well mean write a sonnet as become one. As with the other lords in the play, Armado’s first instinct upon falling in love is to pick up the pen. And so strong are his feelings that he envisions composing “whole volumes” of verses that are impressive enough to publish “in folio.”
Novi hominem tanquam te. His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it. (5.1.10–15)
At the top of act 5, when Nathaniel mentions having recently met Armado, Holofernes responds with these words of disdain. Characteristically, he opens with a Latin phrase, this one meaning, “I know the man as well as I know you.” He then proclaims that everything about the Spaniard is deficient. Armado is, in his estimation, a pretentious and imperious braggart who’s defined by outlandish ambition and ridiculous vanity. Although there is clearly some truth in Holofernes’s estimation of Armado’s shortcomings, it’s equally clear that he’s being far too harsh. In fact, we might argue that his critique of Armado might better apply to himself. Even so, it’s amusing to contrast Holofernes’s dismissal of Armado to the extravagant praise heaped on him by the King and his lords back in the play’s opening scene.
